The problem is magic find limits builds.
The problem is why MF is there at all. D2 devs made specific drop rate which they considered good for leveling and completing the game (on all 3 difficulties). However they wanted to increase drop rate for those who wanted to play further, after beating hell/hell. Why not make a better drop from the very start, from lvl 1? Especially when you find just a few common (with the best drop chance) uniques while leveling from a huge pool of unique items (by the way, there was no such problem in Diablo 1, where unique drop rate was higher). I see 2 possible answers: a) it was somewhat problematic to change all that droprate they’ve made initially so they just added MF stat to increase it artificially. b) they considered leveling to be a some kind of a demo, a glimpse of all that big treasury that awaits you as a treasure hunter. In any case I don’t understand why they just didn’t increase the drop rate for all characters of a certain level (for example, 75) who farm the endgame - that would remove builds limitations.
So I think MF in its initial (classic) form is not a great idea. If D4 devs want players to alter droprates in a specific way, they better come up with a more diversified variant. MF Talisman with specific MF charms is a nice one, I think.
Imo make MF a survival bonus primarily.
Build up an MF bonus as you gain XP. It might stack up to 200% MF. If you die you lose up to 50% MF per death.
I wouldn’t be against having MF in a charm system too.
I don’t really see a reason to bring it back on gear though.
Ye, thats an idea though won’t work good in Hardcore and again doesn’t add diversity. I was also thinking about that new paragon system (or whatever D4 will have for us on its place). What if instead of buffing you with power it would buff you with small amounts of MF, which in turn has deminishing returns like in D2 or even more severe. Without D3-like drop rates and (with) restricted trading this can make sense.
Yet I still see Fortune shrines to this day…
Technically it will work just fine in Hardcore. You would just never lose the bonus there, without also losing your character. Seems fair enough to me. Not a very interesting bonus in HC of course. But only because the survival aspect is already build into HC.
That said, it was a short version of an idea I have posted before.
Longer version is that along with the 200% MF bonus, enemies also gain a small dmg and HP bonus (like 20% more dmg and 20% more HP or whatever).
So there is a bit of risk/reward involved in it.
When you die, you lose 50% MF, and enemies lose 5% dmg and HP. Which then starts to build up again as you kill mobs.
It then serves more of the same purpose as MF on gear did; instead of replacing some dmg for MF on gear, you might just need to replace some dmg for defense, to survive the extra dmg enemies deal.
Then there could be an NPC in town, that allows you to reset it, if you don’t want the added difficulty. HC might need that of course, since dying to reset it, would not exactly be an option.
Note; the MF bonus should be a fair bit higher than the increase in enemy difficulty, since the main goal is to reward people for playing better and staying alive. Hence the 200% MF being significantly larger than the monster dmg/HP increase.